


Touched

by citruses



Category: The Eagle | Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: F/M, POV Minor Character, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 01:04:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citruses/pseuds/citruses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of a woman bard who loves the Seal Prince, until she doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touched

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song by Vast, which I recommend highly.
> 
> Written for Round Three of the 2nd Fanmedia Challenge at ninth_eagle on LJ. This story was inspired by both the photograph of Goslar Warrior, by Henry Moore, and the erotic wall-art. Something about the combination of fighting, vulnerability, and sex felt very appropriate for this fandom...
> 
> I'm once again indebted to sineala for making her Women of The Eagle post. This time I wrote about the red-haired woman and her little girl, who appear in the Seal People's village. 
> 
> No archive warnings apply, but I feel like the Seal Prince's character is a warning in himself. Please do contact me if you would like more detail about this.

They used to tell her she had a queen's face. Where she was born, over the broad dark seas, the bards were gristly whitebeards, but there were always women who swooned to hear their song, and so they went about singing their way into any bed they willed. A queen's face, they told her, their hands already reaching for her.  
  
She would become a bard herself, in time. Not a queen, though. Never a queen.  
  
.  
  
The men who went with the woman bard from place to place were rough sorts, might easily have been robbers if they'd not found a better trade with her; most of them had grown up raiding cattle, lifting purses, taking backhands and giving them in return. The woman bard was hardy, too – not a villain, for they were none of them quite villains, but she had learned to carry from place to place little save the essentials of living and singing, and she had the unselfconscious look of one who cares for nothing but her occupation. A poet's look. A warrior's look.   
  
Their road was winding and their journey endless, for they went wherever they might be paid, and stayed never so long as to become familiar. If any man they met laid his hands on the woman bard, he usually lost them. Women who came to her, who tried to worship her as they would worship bards who were men, went away looking as though she had slapped them across the face.  
  
When she sang, the people said, it was like watching an archer kill a doe: glorious and painful.  
  
.  
  
It was hard for her to love him, when she had spent so long folded in on herself like a stiff winter bud, like the furled wing of a captive bird. It was hard to want somebody's hands on her again, especially his: those hard, cold, grey seal's hands, roughened by salt water and stained with the colour of his tribe.  
  
Her prince. His men killed her band and she didn't even care; she had known for a long time that she would not weep for them. They had been useful in their turn and now they were dead. And the woman bard was alive, so alive it seemed to hurt something in her chest, like breathing in sharp lungfuls of cold sea air. They brought her to the prince in the twilight and his eyes were a black ocean and his hands were too cold but she loved him anyway.  
  
At feasting-time the song flowed out of her as wine flows from a full jug; the prince's people kept their counsel, eyes hard and faces solemn, but they gave her food, and skins to sleep on, and a corner of the old women's hut. When she grew with his child, they looked after her, with their meagre provisions, in their cold, knowing way.  
  
.  
  
The girl was small but she was strong; her first breath was drawn in for a scream that her mother thought half poetry, half war cry. But this was no bard, this child: as she grew, she cared not for her mother's rhythms and words, but for her father's pride and power.   
  
He taught her to run by running away from her. Clumsily painting herself grey, she followed him everywhere; she could sprint after the men of the tribe, outrun boys twice her age.  
  
On odd evenings, the prince would send for the woman bard still, and still she would go, though she could barely look at him without aching and she said, always said, that she would leave as soon as the child was grown enough. When they coupled in the half-light she would try to hurt him, digging her hands into the hard grey body over her; but he would laugh then, and touch her with such tenderness that she knew she could not leave for a long time yet.  
  
.  
  
A person is only a newcomer, they say, until somebody newer arrives. When the woman bard first saw that southern lad, little and strong – a sharp face with the sad look of one who has lost his folk – she almost pitied him. How very sad it must be not to have a home, she thought for a moment, and then remembered the years and miles of her own homelessness; remembered that the seals were not her people.   
  
At night she looked across at her girl's sleeping shape, huddled in a bed of sealskins. This would never be home, to the woman bard. But there had been that moment, when she had forgotten.  
  
.  
  
She saw it: saw him realise that his boy had betrayed them.   
  
All the tribe was together when it happened; the seals' eyes were hard and the women's mouths went into grim lines, but she was not looking at the others. She looked at him, and knew then that she must leave. The bard and her girl must be as far away from this place as they could be, as soon as they could be.   
  
It felt like waking up, like the moment when she finished her singing: the spell breaking and the whole untidy world flooding back. His seals were rushing around them now, his father barking out commands; the other women wittered on about the little southern cur and his Roman slave, wishing all the gods' curses on the both of them, one quavering voice wailing that the golden bird was gone, gone –  
  
His eyes met hers, from a distance, and it was like looking down into the deepest well: she saw her death in their blackness and shied back from it. At last, at last, she knew the prince for what he was. What it meant to be close to him.   
  
The boy was going to die, and she must leave the lands of her cold, dangerous, spellbinding prince.  
  
(She had thought that her song gave her power, had fooled herself that she was at least his equal when they coupled. That his shadowed movements were as desperate and as keenly felt as her own. But what power could she have against the tides, or the turn of the seasons? Can a woman's words silence thunder, her body turn back a hailstorm?)  
  
.  
  
She found her daughter trailing after the young seals and lifted the girl as a cat lifts its kitten, paying no heed to the girl's resistance. They would gather what they needed to travel with, take little enough that nobody would follow after them as thieves; by the time the seals returned, they would be long gone.   
  
Perhaps she would dress as a man; or perhaps the forbidding way she had would hold off anyone who thought her a vulnerable target. It was only the prince, she thought, whose burning presence pulled at her with such gravity that it rendered her weak. Other men were, if not better, at least easier to deal with. She would find her way.  
  
Go south, where the weather and the people are warmer. Go south, and hope never to find another man with the black vastness of the night in his eye, and the coldness of the northern seas in his heart.


End file.
